Watch KDE’s Virtual Professional Learning series

The Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE) Virtual Professional Learning series is now available on the KDE website. Teachers across Kentucky have completed a series of six virtual professional learning sessions through the Kentucky Math Academy on the effective teaching practices from “Principles to Actions.”

Use these sessions to build professional learning experiences for yourself, your colleagues, schools and districts. The sessions include:

Virtual Professional Learning Session 6: Andrew Stadel – middle school teacher, blogger, national presenter of mathematics, founder of Estimation 180 and active learner – looked at the value of engaging in meaningful discourse to further making sense of the world through reasoning with mathematics. Stadel also engaged participants in clothesline activities to visually see dynamic student-centered activities that build number sense, conceptual understanding and procedural fluency.

Virtual Professional Learning Session 5: Anne Burgunder – who works with many Kentucky teachers through the Kentucky Center for Mathematics’ Summer Institutes, master coaching and content coaching – took a deeper dive into the effective teaching practices, specifically building procedure fluency from conceptual understanding from “Principles to Actions.”

Virtual Professional Learning Session 4: Steve Leinwand – who is a well-known researcher, coach, teacher, agent of change and lead writer of “Principles to Actions” – joined Kentucky educators to discuss the importance of questions in order to engage students in discourse and elicit their understanding.

Virtual Professional Learning Session 3: This session featured Graham Fletcher – teacher, blogger and active learner – who continued working with educators on Practice 2 – “Implementing tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving,” and Practice 4 – “Facilitating meaningful mathematical discourse” using work from Margaret “Peg” Smith and Mary Kay Stein. Smith and Stein are authors of “5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions.” This session is in two parts.

Virtual Professional Learning Session 1: This session gave an overview of the effective mathematics teaching practices from “Principles to Actions.”

Instructional Materials Evaluation Tool (IMET) professional development module
The Kentucky mathematics instructional materials evaluation forms for grades K-8 and 9-12 incorporate the Instructional Materials Evaluation Tool (IMET). An introduction and Mathematics Professional Development module for IMET is located on the Achieve the Core website.

This math-specific professional learning module is designed to give a high-level overview of the IMET to various shareholders. The module includes a presentation, handouts and a facilitator guide.

Project for Education Research that Scales (PERTS)
PERTS has an all-about-mindset kit encompassing a free set of online lessons and practices designed to help you teach and foster adaptive beliefs about learning. The mindset kit addresses the following topics:

About Growth Mindset

Teaching a Growth Mindset

Praise the Process, Not the Person

Celebrate Mistakes

Assessment for a Growth Mindset

Math – Give Tasks That Promote Struggle and Growth

Within each topic there are a series of lessons complemented with related materials from its resource library. PERTS also offers a growth mindset professional learning for parents. This was developed in collaboration with Raise the Bar. Parents learn what a growth mindset is, why it’s important and best practices to support their children in developing this learning belief.

The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) publishes Kentucky Teacher to communicate directly with the state’s 40,000 public school teachers. The stories of this award-winning publication include news, perspectives, and practical, workable ideas for guiding students to higher levels of achievement.